I have been considering the question of whether the archetypal single founder can make the leap to entering the space industry while remaining entrepreneurial.
That is, can the ‘classic’ single founder, the typical solopreneur we are familiar with who has a website, blog, a software product or two, perhaps even a profitable SaaS, whose work routine typically centers around some group of customers with specific needs that are helped by the founder’s skills, make the leap to entering the space industry while remaining entrepreneurial.
What’s more, how can they do it without being an industry professional. Specifically speaking, without being an astronaut, test pilot, astronomer, physicist, aerospace engineer, or, at the very least, an insider employee of NASA/JPL/BlueOrigin/SpaceX, but rather as an intelligent and reasonably literate layperson.
I am thinking about this, well, to be honest, primarily because I’ve always been a space geek, a science fiction nerd, the kind of kid who knew the names of every planet in Larry Niven’s Known Space. I was the only kid in my elementary school who knew what a parsec was (maybe others did know but wisely kept their mouths shut, though I doubt it).
The second, more business-y reason, is that space, I believe, is the next sector of the economy to enter really explosive, logarithmic growth. Just look at the following chart (taken from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/yearly-number-of-objects-launched-into-outer-space):
Here I am heeding Rob Walling‘s advice I read in his Start Marketing the Day You Start Coding, that “market comes first”. Looking at the graph above, I’m thinking that’s certainly a market set to explode.
Additionally, I think that is moving out of its elite, state-sized, mega-project period and into the SMB level. From there it will eventually enter the garage startup level.
So, what kind of space-related topics, services, or products will start rolling out, coming online?
Off the bat, anything satellite related. A year ago it was CubeSats, lately its been Starlink.
I’ll post new things I’ve thought of when I can.
Basically I think that a good rule of thumb is to follow anything SpaceX does. They are the pioneers nowadays of space commercialization.